David Edwards | RAW STORY 15 Oct 2015
Two Iowa parents are calling for an educator at Bailey Park Elementary School in Grinnell to be fired for allegedly making racist comments to mixed-race children.
Geoff Burd choked up as he explained to KCCI that his daughter,
Nikki, came home from school and recalled that the para-educator had said black people and white people should not be a family or go to the same school.
“It’s an unbelievable situation,” Burd said, sounding defeated. “I work very hard to protect her. I have worked her entire life to protect her.”

The privilege of being lighter skinned
I am a lighter skinned Black woman. I am light enough to benefit from shadism but dark enough to still be accepted as Black. A uniquely privileged position. Throughout my upbringing I have received messages in my environment that this made me more desirable, more worthy, and/or more significant than my darker skinned counterparts. These messages were both covert and overt and articulated in the home and outside the home, at school, in the media etc… Pretty much everywhere. There is no doubt that I was, at times, spoken to in kinder voices or treated with more patience than my darker skinned peers or sisters by both people of colour and by White people, all things being equal. In time, I have learnt that my femininity and womanhood would be more easily accepted.

Parenting and internalised racism

…in our efforts to compensate for racism, we socialise children into injustice, compliance and complicity and instil a sense of inferiority in them. In doing so we may limit children’s scope to be themselves. We may reduce our capacity to respond to them with compassion and kindness. We may attend to stereotypes of what our children could be or could be seen as, rather than attending to them as unique persons. In a nutshell, we may contribute to racism’s self-fulfilling prophecies, perpetuate racial inequalities and more worryingly, may increase their risk of psychological distress.The perpetuation of oppression is everyone’s business

Internalising racism is adaptive. It is no pathology.

The construction of reality is controlled by the dominant group and circulated throughout society

those who are oppressed come to internalise the dominant group’s interests as their own

the interests of the oppressors are presented as actually reflecting everyone’s best interests…

the construction of a superior class is dependent upon the existence of an inferior one.

double bind: Be like us to be human. Trying to be like us is evidence that you are not human.

Mixed-race children face unique challenges, but raising biracial children who are happy and healthy is possible if parents teach them to embrace all facets of their racial makeup, settle in diverse communities and choose schools that celebrate multiculturalism, among other measures.